


The Thing in the Cellar

by indulgentDaemon



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Homestuck
Genre: AU, Body Horror, Cthulhu Mythos, Eldritch, Gen, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 04:48:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1065952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indulgentDaemon/pseuds/indulgentDaemon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in an AU where SBURB was never played, and subsequently the four kids didn't establish their online friendship, this chapter focuses on Rose, who will be the main character of this little excursion to the world of Lovecraftian Horror. Started because I still feel guilty for dropping my bodyhorror fic with Rose and Kanaya so long ago. Do note that this particular chapter doesn't yet contain the tagged body horror nor transformation, as these were added for the sake of future continuation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thing in the Cellar

She had lived there for two years; time she had spent more in darkness than in light, years of falling asleep to the isolated sound of her beating heart, interrupted only by the faint whispers from the other apartments, half-heard sounds that shed no light on what was happening. The clock on her wall had no batteries, they died just the barest week after she had moved her last items in, and she had never bothered to change them. There was barely enough room to move, as stacks of books lined all shelves and open surfaces, piled upon another as precariously as orderly, sorted in meticulous fashion after author and topic. The wallpapers were dry and peeling at places, a pale yellow surface with a bleak, greyish white beneath, bringing to mind the scabrous surface of a wound left to rot.

The kitchen, if you could call the small cooking corner that, was as immaculate as when she had first moved in. Untouched but for the layer of dust, that irrefutable evidence of disuse. It did not lie, she had not cooked a proper meal but once. She ate out, or did not eat, more often than not. She had never required much food to sustain herself, and ate only when in company. Unless that spell of ravenous hunger befell her, as it sometimes did, and she would eat and eat and eat, satiating that void inside her - the void that she knew spoke of something much worse - until she could stomach it no more. A terrible sensation of regret would wash across her afterwards, a prickling wave across her skin that set the hairs on edge; slender, soft, pearlescent hairs that were as if invisible against her skin. She would coil up, with a book, if her fortitude would permit, like a cat, or a snake, yet in such a way as to ensure that the lack of comfort would forbid her from sleep.

She slept on a couch; a black, cracked old thing that she had gotten off a missionary group that would resell old, used pieces of furniture and objects of clothing. Its surface was criss-crossed with pale, sharp lines, like the crackled surface of volcanic rock as it cools, and it smelled dimly of hair, whose she did not know, but it was not a bad smell. Even the most minute of motions would make the it creak, yet the way its leathery surface captured the heat of her body, and sent it back to her, wrapped her in it, made it an object of comfort and security. When she was not on her couch she felt cold, exposed and naked, as if the surrounding world was draining her of the last of her body’s warmth. Maybe she was right, she had once studied entropy briefly and had found it an interesting subject at glance, yet the principles of thermodynamics did strange things to her mind, and she had forced herself to resign from the course mid-semester, with the excuse that she needed to focus on her main subject. That of literature.

Rose Lalonde was in no ways a happy person, but she was satisfied. She was attending her second year of Literature Studies, had achieved an uneven, but by both sides appreciated truce with her mother, and she was slowly accumulating a large quantity of books that she would painstakingly restore and add to her personal library. There was no irony to realize in this, no skewered sense of priorities, because she treated the books like she treated herself. Her hair was perfect, not a lock out of place, and the make-up she applied, which was very little, was done with utmost care and consideration. Her rituals of cleanliness were fastidious, but not extravagant, and her closet contained an appreciable selection of outfits that would without doubt never earn her much attention, but to her benefit also would not offend. She would be described as having a sensible style and fashion, although somewhat single-minded in her choice of colors, her having a deep fondness for lilac. Little else would be said in regards to that matter.

She wasn’t oft spoken of, as few knew enough about her to speak, but even rarer were those occurrences where someone had spoken to her. She was described by those who had talked to her as cold, but in no way unpleasant, and seemed wholly and fully uninterested in the casual small talk of those around her. She was polite to the point of reserved and she would never speak of herself. She was smart, but showed it only during exams and in her essays and never in seminars, or even to impress outside of the classroom. The professors would grade her accordingly, sometimes high out of pity for a perceived difficulty, sometimes in the middle, with the explanation that it was simply not enough to be present in body, the mind also needed to attend. 

In truth, she cared little for what either her classmates, or professors, thought of her. In a few years they would be replaced by new faces and new names until they too would move on. Perhaps one or two would linger, but she held on to no delusion that any of the contacts she made would last far into her adult life. She took great pride in her own intelligence and wittiness, but held herself to such high standard that she would not deign to elaborate on it unless she could convince her greatest critic, herself, that she was beyond fault on the subject. Her growing collection of writings, personal, secret prose, spoke volumes of the doubt still gnawing at her, for none were without annotations and corrections, crossed-over words and discouraging remarks in the margins. She disliked writing - proper writing, not the communicative or relaxed sort - on a computer, because it clouded her critical eye.

Indeed, her true passion was in the written word, and where she was, there was an abundance of it. Since arriving to Essex County in Massachusetts, Rose spent most of the free time between her classes browsing and perusing the University’s extensive library, even aiding (unabided) in restoring some order to its myriad of misplaced books. She would spend hours in the dry, ancient study rooms, pouring over tomes and omnibusse; drawing deep from the poetic wells of Tennyson, Coleridge and Browning. She would compare the immature and overwrought Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther with his older self, made manifest in Faust, and she would draw parallels between More’s Utopia and Huxley’s Brave New World.

It was during one such venture in the library that she had come upon the restricted section. Most libraries had them, of course, but those would usually only contain volumes so old, and in such a bad shape that they were not readily available. Yet Rose knew, as did many who studied at the Miskatonic University, that the institution had a long and oft-times sordid history of patronizing those studying the less orthodox of sciences. Naturally, over time, the recount of these occurrences would become muddled and embellished, but here, she knew, was the place where any evidence of the University’s murky past had been buried and forgotten.

The restricted section wasn’t hidden per se, but the presence of a rather large and imposing collection of dissertations served both to hide the stairwell’s existence, and impede any attempt to access it through conventional means. That did little to stop her, however, and with some effort she slid between the shelves and stepped down the uneven steps that descended to the cellar, searching for a lightswitch of some kind to illuminate her way.

She found one at last, a cord descending from the ceiling and which, at a tug, brought light through an old, dim bulb that blinded her momentarily. When she regained her sight, she was at first not sure if she had.

The library of the Miskatonic University shared its storage, it seemed, with the small museum that so often displayed the old findings of expeditions once sponsored by the institution. Preserved animals of surprising size greeted her once she had finally regained her sight, and a particularly imposing grizzly, standing on its hind legs with its fangs bared, made her flinch.

Yet the preserved creatures only seemed to add to the shadows, as their matted fur appeared to suckle in the desperate rays of light that the bulb would exude. Gold-framed paintings, covered in bleached rags, leaned against walls, shelves and exhibitions, and a monolith, seven feet tall, stood surrounded by a pile of cartons, as if sprung from their midst, gleaming dark and smooth with its polished stone surface. Glass jars too grimy and old to reveal their content lined the shelves inside and, as she moved further in, she found herself brushing against cobwebs that clung to her body like heavy veils. Every few feet she would light another bulb, and they would flicker into life, bringing only enough light for her to see where she was stepping and to add to the amount of unnerving shapes and forms that surrounded her. Only the muted sound of her footsteps and the occasional creak from the wooden floor above her kept her on her toes.

When she finally came upon a bookshelf, the initial allure of the section had fled her, and she promised herself to only throw it a glance before returning to the homework she had left unattended in the study room. She walked up to the glass-enclosed shelves, the sliding doors closed and locked but the volumes inside visible. There was a table as well, the old kind that was used for studying books, built with a raised bookrest so that the volume could be observed without having to hold it. Old inkwells and pens cluttered the rest of the surface, accompanied by a stack of similarly old, moldered writing paper.

As she leaned in to study the contained tomes, there seemed to be no order in which they were held. Some of them seemed to be old accounts from expeditions, logs of both sea- and land faring, although who had written them, and when, could not be interpreted from their backs. Tucked in between the volumes were sheets of paper, aged but well preserved, and it itched her that she had no means of accessing them. Yet she consoled herself that they were, most likely, dull and unimportant to any but those who had funded whatever research the documents reported on.

Then came books she recognized, books you could find in newer print, like the Malleus Maleficarum, Formicarius and other texts purportedly written to single out those who had sold their souls to the devil in exchange for power. Yet these were very old copies, possibly some of the oldest prints, and the collector inside her marvelled at how well preserved they were. Had she entertained any thoughts of breaking the flimsy lock that kept her from the books before, she abandoned such notions knowing that she might damage these priceless objects in the process.

As she continued to examine the volumes stored in the glass cases, more and more of them turned out to be unknown to her. Some were written in languages she could not identify or even read, others had their back torn off or were damaged beyond recognition, yet others carried such names as The Book of Iod, or Las Reglas de Ruina, volumes she had never heard of before. In the dim light, it was hard to make out some titles, and she had to contort herself so as to not block the sparse rays of light from illuminating her objects of study.

A growing sense of urgency had slowly started festering inside her during the time spent in the dungeon-like cellar, and as she continued to read off the backs of the books it swelled, tendrils of fear gripping at her insides, slithering through her like the slowly spreading chill of ice. An indescribable sense of wrong was seeping through and permeating everything she did until finally the sensation became too much to bear, and she turned to depart, vowing to bring with her a flashlight the next time she ventured into the restricted section. But barely had she taken a few steps before the light above her head died with a pop, quickly followed by another, and another, as the ancient electrical circuitry failed her.

She was engulfed in complete darkness, and for the first time in her life terror gripped at her heart. Her blood raced and her ears filled with the sound of it rushing through her veins until it threatened to overtake her. Her breath sped up as the air was forced out of her lungs, the enclosing walls suffocating her slowly. Wherever she turned she saw nothing, and as she lost all sense of space she bumped and stumbled over the myriad of objects around her. Her elbow brushed against something wet and hard, and as she yanked it back it fell crashing to the floor, a dreadfully wet, overbearing stench filling her nostrils. Something splashed once, then twice, building up pace as if it was a fish stranded upon a merciless shore, deprived of the life giving water from whence it came.

Something else was in there with her, and she did not know what. She heard faint sounds, like whispers, yet distorted so that no matter how she tried, she could not make out the words they spoke despite how familiar they were to her ears. And behind the voices, behind the splashing on the floor, a dark, deep beating like that of a drum, irregular and overwhelming. It made her entire being tremble, her sense of balance thrown askew as she gripped for whatever was near to steady herself. She felt small, insignificant, as if the sound was the beating of a giant’s massive heart, and she was but an insect, crawling upon the surface of earth..

She could not allow herself to make a sound, to make her presence more known than it already was, lest she be discovered by whatever was stalking amongst the things in the cellar. And through all of it, the unbearable stench, and the wet squelching sound of whatever she had let loose on the floor made her sick to her stomach. Something brushed against her leg, and she grabbed the first thing her hands could reach to sweep at it. The weight of what she had taken nearly made her stumble, and she was surprised that what was in her hands was a book so heavy she could barely carry it. 

She had no time to think further on it, because the drumming sound, which she had blissfully forgotten but for a second, once more gripped hold of her, and she clutched the book tightly to her chest in a vain attempt to guard herself against whatever it was. The thing on the ground had stopped splashing, but instead a cold, slithering presence traveled up her leg, numbing her flesh.

She ran. And as she moved, it was as if the objects in the cellar all sprang to life; silent and condemning they reached out for her. The objects in the bottles slammed against the inside walls, producing wet, hollow sounds that accompanied the beat of that ancient drum. The shelves rattled, threatening to fall on top of her, and the animals were all coming to life, growling and hissing, claws and fangs reaching to devour her. The grizzly in particular was ready to pounce, to descend upon her and tear her to shreds.

She had no tears, no screams, only the primal, animalistic fear that was overtaking her, and the adrenaline-induced terror spawned of that ancestral fear of the unknown evil that lurked in the darkness, far from the safety and warmth of light. She stumbled; once, twice, fell, but crawled to her feet, the wet presence on her leg having long since let go, yet the numbness was still spreading, radiating from her leg and making it harder to move, each step more sluggish than the previous.

Then suddenly, light. She was at the foot of the stairs, and she wasted no further time looking back. She threw herself up the uneven stone steps, clinging to the handrail at the side with one arm, the other clutching mechanically the book she had taken. With the last ounces of her strength she leapt into the light, and fell hard against the shelf blocking the stairs.

Breath came back to her slowly, but vision took much longer. Blurred and out of focus, she could not fix her eyes upon anything until minutes later. When she did, she saw that both her skin, and her clothes, remained untouched and dry. Only the cobwebs she had caught on the way down remained on her body, and upon inspection there was nothing on her leg to hint at the slithering presence that had crept upon it. Yet the unpleasant numbness was only beginning to fade.

She stood up, slowly, with the book in her arms. It felt lighter, and should have been too, as it seemed no thicker than perhaps two hundred pages at most. It was bound in old leather and had a lock, although the metal seemed to have long since rusted off. A geometrical figure was engraved on the cover, and as she stared at it her eyes began to hurt, making it hard to fully trace the lines composing it. It was filled in with an ink that seemed golden at first glance, yet, as she looked at it from another angle, it was as red as fresh blood. The book bore no title, but as she opened to the very first page she read: “Testamentum Insano Arab”, The Testimony of the Mad Arab. A smile curled her lips as she propped herself up against the shelf, all thoughts of homework banished from her mind.


End file.
